Have you ever seen someone you used to know whom you thought was put together well? Then you run into them years later, and they look like they just gave up. That’s Vermont.

A shadow of its once great self, unwashed hair but lots of make-up, searching other people’s pants pockets for change to feed the washing machine at the liquor laundromat.

No unfiltered Lucky Strike hanging from one chapped lip – they more or less banned those things. And so it goes. The home state of Calvin Coolidge. A land carved out between New Hampshire and New York in part by a militia and a will to self-govern, and look at it now. It gave up. Democrats rule. The state even banned militias. So, it should be no surprise that this same state has an unconstitutional religious test.

A pair of Christian foster couples is suing the Vermont Department for Children & Families (DCF) for allegedly blocking them from taking on additional foster children due to their Christian views on gender and sexuality. …

Brian and Kaitlyn Wuoti and Michael and Rebecca Gantt began fostering in 2014 and 2016, respectively, with the Wuotis adopting two brothers and the Gantts taking in three children. Brian Wuoti and Michael Gantt are both Christian pastors, as well.

Seeking to renew their license in 2022, the Wuotis were initially hailed by a caseworker who said she “probably could not hand pick a more wonderful foster family,” but mention of their Christian faith and “that they could not say or do anything that went against faith-informed views about human sexuality” prompted their license to be revoked, according to the lawsuit.

If you want more details on that, the internet has plenty. I’m not here to tote that barge or lift that bail. I’m more interested in the culture behind it—the dangerous political undertow visible at a distance, like the flag pole problem in Nashua. It’s just a flag and a pole, but that’s not the matter that should concern you most. As I noted here, yesterday,

What’s the worst that could happen? The City has to stop pretending to be non-partisan and unbiased; no more citizen flags of any stripe. That’s what Boston did after wasting two million dollars defending its viewpoint discrimination and losing. Let them do that and then we get to ask them what else about their administration is just like the flagpole

The answer is probably everything.

Nashua also has a criminal disregard for public records law. That’s a problem, but the real issue is what lies beneath it. So it goes with a State like Vermont, which—without any public announcements or citizen approval—deployed and enforced a religious test for foster parents. You’d be a damned fool to think there isn’t one for other features of State government or that the culture that abets such a thing hasn’t poisoned other wells in “the community.”

The volume of impropriety is a proverbial iceberg.

It is why we pushed back so hard on a bill to charge fees for public documents. It is why we pushed back on a Camel’s Nose red flag bill proposed by a Republican. I don’t care what protections you think you included. You can make all the sensible arguments you want; this will lead to abuses whose risk is far greater to life and liberty than the odds that a mentally unstable person will look for and find a gun-free zone in which to harm others with a firearm (the cure to which is to ban gun-free zones by the way).

We do not open these doors. They are hills to die on. And the religious test is not a fluke. It is evidence that the patients are running the asylum, and if you bother to look, you can see the results. Higher taxes. Declining services. Dumber students. Increased lawlessness. Drug crimes. Drug deaths. And the only answer the inmates can think of is for you to give them more money and power. A cabal that calls you names and tries to destroy you if you dare to push back.

And you voted for this.

So, when you think about the case of the Christian Parents, remember that this has nothing to do with their faith or yours. It is about the demise of a once great state that valued natural rights before political power. That’s what this is about. It is about watching that political system gnaw away at your rights until you have none (in the name of Democracy, no less). And you can choose to continue to ignore it or not.

It’s your state.

But I don’t advise it.

 

Note: More than a few corrections after publication – so this version differs slightly from the original.

The post Of Course, Vermont Has an Unconstitutional Religious Test appeared first on Granite Grok.

 

It is sad and unfortunate that this question even comes to the surface. The of voting early and often in Chicago should be behind us. We should have the technology to secure an election so that the outcome is beyond scrutiny. We also know it is terribly naive to think that way. I am not a political or election expert, but I think I can look at a situation objectively and apply logic to my assessment. My take on the 2020 election is there is no way in hell that Joe Biden got 81 million votes legitimately, and the Democrats effectively manipulated the results. I guess that makes me a reluctant election denier. I accept that Joe Biden is our president, but not how he found his way to the Oval Office. With America in the grasp of a global pandemic and Joe Biden rarely leaving his Delaware basement, there is no logical explanation for Biden garnering over 12 million votes more than Barack Obama did when he set the previous record in 2008. Obama was a shooting star hitting the political scene. A Black man with little Washington experience who captured the minds of Democrats and all minorities saw him as a savior. Joe Biden was an aging white man who spent his life in Washington and had little to show for his five decades of playing the system except for a healthy retirement plan he could not account for. Joe was a symbol of the past and certainly not of hope for the future, except he grasped the WOKE culture with a Black female VP and the promise of diversity even at the expense of quality.

The Democrat machine put Joe Biden in the White House, and with the hatred manufactured on the Left for Donald Trump, they probably would have been successful with Bob Menendez. The Democrats used to be the Party of the People, but now they are masters of how to use the People. They had conditioned groups like the Blacks and Browns that they were the only Party that looked out for them, and thus, they were owed their votes. They own the abortion issue and, therefore, have a stranglehold on the women’s vote. And as anti-business as their policies prove, they still command the Union votes. They do a better job of registering new voters, utilizing early voting, and creating votes with ballot harvesting. And don’t forget they have Hollywood and the media shamelessly wearing uniforms with a Big D on their chests.

The Republicans are late to the game. They still think you can win the Presidency by playing by the rules, and now they are going to battle with a man who is either revered or hated and now wears a huge F on his suit coat. Most people cannot tell you what crime Trump committed to become a convicted felon, but that does not matter. The fact that every Democrat can call Trump a convicted felon will pay dividends. Trump’s conviction will be overturned, but probably not until after the election. The damage has been done, and it may be enough to keep Trump out of the Oval and put Biden/Harris, along with whoever is really running things back in.

Do I think Trump can win? Absolutely, but his VP pick is crucial. With either man, voters know this is a one-term deal. People will actually be voting for the VP. We know Harris and her record, and she definitely should not be anywhere near the Oval Office. Trump has some incredible talent to choose from. He may be forced to play the diversity card and go with Tim Scott or Nicky Haley. Either would be a good choice, but the Republicans have to commit to playing a dirty campaign if they want to win the prize. I think they can do it, and the country needs them to do it. Let’s get it done.

The post Can We Trust The Outcome In November appeared first on Granite Grok.

Sorry for the lack of warning about dropping the Comment of the Week again—it is temporary. I was busy and lost track of it last week, making it unlikely I’d get things in order in time for (last) Monday Morning.

This week is similar, as I suspect it will be the next few, so that’s on hold.

As noted previously, the new website, moving to a new server, and some other things that came up during the preparations have taken up the time I had to do other things, so those things will have to take a vacation.

I also suspect there will be an adjustment period when the new website is up. There will be questions about the commenting system and authors who can’t figure out how to use the new editor in the back end as well as getting things to work and look the way they should.

Yes, Growing pains for a website that’s been around for nearly twenty years (that b-day is in 2026).

Hang tight. We’ll get through this, and then I need to pester endlessly about fundraising (joy!).

 

 

The post Housekeeping: … appeared first on Granite Grok.

Solar was never green. The lifecycle footprint from manufacture to transportation, installation, and end of life is top-heavy, with materials and processes that produce a lot of pollution. That was true before China captured most of the market.

China made them cheaper.

[T]he majority of experts consulted by Environmental Progress agree that China’s competitive advantage did not lie in an innovative new technological process, but rather in the very same factors the country has always used to outcompete the West: cheap coal-fired energy, mass government subsidies for strategic industries, and human labor operating in poor working conditions.

The IPCC and everyone else, for that matter, had been peddling old data based on manufacturing in places like Europe that use Natural Gas to power their production facilities. But China produces “more than 80 percent of global solar-grade polysilicon, a critical input into solar arrays. It doesn’t stop there; China manufactures 97 percent of the global supply of solar wafers, another essential component.”

IPCC and others “claim solar PV is 48 gCO2/kWh. But, a new investigation started by Italian researcher Enrico Mariotti suggests that the number is closer to between 170 and 250 gCO2/kWh, depending on the energy mix used to power PV production. If this estimate is accurate, solar would not compare favorably with natural gas, which is around 50 gCO2/kWh with carbon capture, and 400 to 500 without.”

According to his findings, the carbon intensity of solar panels manufactured in China and installed in European countries like Italy was off by an order of magnitude. An initial back-of-the-envelope calculation put it at between 170 and 250g of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour (kWh), as opposed to the official estimate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 20-40g per kWh. Way off.

The scale of the IPCC’s undercount shocks once applied to the EU’s “clean” energy plans. Following Mariutti’s math, the esteemed scientific body underestimates the emissions from the EU’s solar installations built in 2022 alone by 5.4 to 7.6 million metric tons, equivalent to adding 3.4 to 4.8 million cars to the road.

While this makes for an interesting story, there is a bigger one. No one seems to care. They don’t want to invest in finding the truth, which suggests to me it is an inconvenient one, and if word got out, the general public might not be so impressed by billions of tax dollars invested in green technology to buy solar components from Chin made with dirty coal.

That’s not even the biggest act of fraud.

You can’t build any of it without fossil fuels. None of this is possible without large-scale mining operations. The rare earth metals and the not so rare have huge carbon footprints. Things like concrete and steel are impossible without coal, oil, or gas. There is no energy future free from fossil fuels, and the future promised is not cleaner than one without the so-called renewables (that need ot be replaced every decade or two).

Enrico Mariutti’s revelation is unpopular not just because it exposes fraud but because he is one of them. “An environmental obsessive passionate about facilitating the world’s transition from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy.” He’s still on board; he’s just asking everyone to be honest about it, which is more than they can promise or deliver because the lie isn’t just about how dirty the new technology is; it is that it has nothing to do with CO2 or saving the planet.

The post Night Cap: Solar Panels Are Getting Exponentially Less Green By Leaps and Bounds appeared first on Granite Grok.

A recent report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) concludes that Tyson Foods is responsible for dumping billions of gallons of contaminated water into American waterways. Though efforts to curtail water pollution are surely important, aspects of the so-called “scientific” report are cause for pause. In the name of “independent public science,” the UCS report reveals pervasive partisan content that suggests the organization – and the attack on Tyson Foods – may have broader implications than merely cleaning up rivers and streams.

Tyson Report Summary

Based on EPA estimates of facility discharges and past “studies,” the UCS report carries the headline-catchy title “Waste Deep” and chronicles the detrimental impact of effluent discharges from Tyson Foods’ meat processing facilities. Certainly, the consolidation of the agricultural and food processing industries in recent decades has fostered a concentration of pollutants at the expense also of human and animal health, food security, local communities, and rural culture. However, the propaganda of the proposed woke Utopian solution would increase government regulatory domination over small operators, a more deadly threat to humanity (and the ecosystem) than polluted waterways.

The report focuses on contaminants being discharged by the company into waterways, though conceding that Tyson Foods has “indicated it was working to address water quality where it operates and put forward a goal to ‘develop Contextual Water Plans at 11 high-risk U.S. locations by 2025.’” UCS does not propose to trust the company to clean up its own operations, instead advocating to regulate the entire industry: to expand EPA, USDA, and other federal oversight of the nation’s 7,000 meat and poultry processors because of the alleged sins of Tyson, which operates 41 plants in the US. This echoes new EPA rules that expand its jurisdiction over nitrogen and phosphorous discharges by meat and poultry processors despite the massive economic compliance costs this will place on small operators.

“Filling Olympic-Size Swimming Pools”

The UCS report employs the bizarre metric of claiming Tyson’s discharges would “fill 132,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.” This unscientific alarmism reflects a politicized assessment. However much cleaning up water discharges may be justified, the attack on Tyson Foods is a Trojan Horse to advance sweeping government control of food and farming in the name of the usual Marxist suspects seen in the European Union assault against farmers there: endangered species, environmental justice, climate change remediation, equity.

UCS claims it is a purveyor not of Big Government servitude but “real science.” Its website proclaims:

“The Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists works for strong, independent public science, a robust, transparent democracy, justice for overburdened communities, and the effective use of science in making policy that serves the common good.

“If these decisions are to be practical and effective, they must be grounded in facts and evidence. If they are to be just and equitable, everyone in the community must have a voice in their making. Thus science and democracy are indispensable partners in ensuring that public decisions serve the public interest.”

The Borg have spoken – in equity-speak. The report is saturated with social justice ideology, including concern for “marginalized communities” and the always dubious “equity” word indispensable to the woke “folks.” The unscientific ideological underpinnings of this purportedly science-based report are reflected in the policy shifts advocated.

Biden’s “Social Justice” Undermines Food Supplies

This assault on small operators for the transgressions of large corporations is a longstanding ruse common to the Biden administration’s supposed environmental initiatives. Although the UCS report glowingly recounts Biden’s support of small processing facilities (nothing partisan there), it ignores that his proposed expansion of federal regulatory power over small processors will undermine profitability and cause many to close – hurting small farms and local food security. Biden’s SEC, EPA, and USDA have all similarly introduced regulatory changes that will disproportionately impact small farms and local food production. The US federal assault on small farms looks more and more like the EU assault on farmers in many nations there.

Biden’s regulations for PFAS reveal a similar inversion: Toxic “forever chemicals” will be “studied” by the EPA for years before any cessation is implemented under new rules, though these discharges will fill more swimming pools than Tyson’s effluent, churned out rapidly thanks to government funding of EVs, heat pumps, wind turbines, and solar panels that spew thousands of these toxins into the air, water, and consumer products. Biden’s vaunted PFAS drinking water standards impose the clean-up costs on the very same marginalized communities for whom the UCS claims it is advocating.

How many Olympic-size swimming pools could have been filled from 2018-2022 with the jet fuel burned in planes for recreational travel, the gasoline used to mow expansive lawns weekly, or the diesel fuel consumed by snow-making machines for ski resorts? None of these produce food, and none are targets of Biden administration environmental justice regulation.

One might think that water cleanup regulations would not exempt such low-hanging environmental fruit in favor of undermining the food supply and driving up prices.

 

John Klar is an Attorney, farmer, and author. Mostly farmer… And Regular Contributor to GraniteGrok and VermontGrok.

The post Biden’s “Social Justice” Undermines Food Supplies appeared first on Granite Grok.

Nashua refuses to fly the Pine Tree flag, Manchester recognizes Friends of the Piscataquag River Park and then things go downhill fast, kids are too coddled, and who is running for what?



The post Manch Talk: City Hall Meltdowns appeared first on Granite Grok.

The experts have been reluctantly niggling at the edges of the truth for a while. The COVID vaccine wasn’t as safe or effective. The Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions didn’t do anything useful and might have done harm (and no one knows whose ideas they were to begin with). Oh, and post-vaccine, an awful lot of people died.

There is some willingness to admit that Covid vaccines could be partly to blame for the rise in excess deaths since the pandemic.

Researchers from The Netherlands analysed data from 47 Western countries and discovered there had been more than three million excess deaths since 2020, with the trend continuing despite the rollout of vaccines and containment measures.

They said the “unprecedented” figures “raised serious concerns” and called on governments to fully investigate the underlying causes, including possible vaccine harms.

You Don’t say?

The study found that across Europe, the US, and Australia, there had been more than one million excess deaths in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, but also 1.2 million in 2021 and 800,000 in 2022 after measures were implemented.

Researchers said the figure included deaths from COVID-19 and the “indirect effects of the health strategies to address the virus spread and infection.”

They warned that side effects linked to the Covid vaccine had included ischaemic stroke, acute coronary syndrome and brain haemorrhage, cardiovascular diseases, coagulation, haemorrhages, gastrointestinal events and blood clotting.

We won’t wait for them to acknowledge that you were right because that won’t happen. It is still too soon. Maybe after the election, we’ll get more research, and one day, more research – politically driven, of course – will find a need to lay bare the systemic fraud, probably as a distraction to cover more of it disguised as the new and improved safer more effective priorities of the public health industrial complex.

If any conspirators still live, maybe someone will be put on trial. It is, after all, part of the game. Hunter Biden and his uncle Jim are getting a good look at, perhaps, an appearance of judicial balance to offset the legal assault on a presidential candidate in a campaign year.

Another act in the play, but look – someone let someone else say vaccines might have contributed to a rise in all-cause mortality.

We are winning.

Are we?

The FDA just approved the latest COVID Booster—for Fall. It is formulated (at least on paper) to help with the latest “variant.” That’s misleading. These mRNA COVID shots are ineffective and more likely to result in infection and transmission, but if they kill the host, the virus in them will eventually die, too.

That’s never been properly disclosed.

But to end on a positive note, fewer and fewer people are volunteering to be test subjects for the latest thing in the covid vaccine universe. Uptake is way down.

I’ll take that win.

The post It’s Almost Okay To Admit That the Response To COVID Killed Some People appeared first on Granite Grok.

Senator Carson exemplifies the arrogance of power. She is seeking re-election as well as the powerful position of Senate President. But she needs to be retired by the voters.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she virtually singlehandedly hijacked and managed to kill a bill passed by a voice vote the House in 2017 that would have strengthened the rights of gun owners in our state. The story is a bit complex, but here goes:

New Hampshire is not a “home rule” state. This means that local governments cannot lawfully purport to legislate on any subject unless they have been explicitly authorized to do so by laws passed by our General Court and enacted into law. If a local government does something in contravention of this principle (sometimes called the “Dillon Rule”), there are at present only very limited avenues available for citizens to put the local governments back in their places, usually involving the hiring of lawyers and the spending of lots of money.

In 2003 and in 2011, New Hampshire enacted what is known as a state pre-emption law, RSA 159:26, that made it abundantly clear that “Except as otherwise specifically provided by statute, no ordinance or regulation of a political subdivision may regulate the sale, purchase, ownership, use, possession, transportation, licensing, permitting, taxation, or other matter pertaining to firearms, firearms components, ammunition, or firearms supplies in the state.”[emphasis added] Although probably not strictly necessary under the Dillon Rule, RSA 159:26 made it, once again, very clear what local government could not do regarding firearms.

However, RSA 159:26, which consists of about 11 lines of unambiguous text, fails to contain any enforcement mechanism that ordinary citizens could use against local governments that ignore the prohibitions of the state pre-emption law.

So, this writer was the prime sponsor of HB307, which materially strengthened RSA 159:26 by providing for a detailed enforcement mechanism that ordinary citizens could use without incurring large legal expenses. The text was modeled on a very successful law from another state.

The text of HB307 was drafted, ultimately modified, and adopted by the House on a voice vote after review and input from representatives of the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the NH Firearms Coalition.

But when HB307 was passed to the Senate and Carson’s Judiciary Committee, she engineered a vote of “non-concurrence” by the Senate, meaning that the Senate would not go along with the House bill. A Committee of Conference was held to try to iron out any issues.

In the Committee of Conference, Carson sought to condition approval of HB307 on a revision that would have removed a very critical word (“use”) in the prohibitory language of RSA 159:26, the effect of which would, in the view of this writer and many others, have effectively gutted RSA 159:26 as it exists.
Because what Carson wanted was so egregious and unacceptable, HB307 died and was never adopted, and we are stuck with RSA 159:26 without any meaningful enforcement tools.

As a side note, when this writer personally called Carson to try to discuss the issue, she said she was too busy to discuss it and brushed it off.

Carson is the Senator from District 14, consisting of Auburn, Hudson, and Londonderry, which reportedly has a small majority of registered Republican voters.

Because Carson has been a fixture in Concord for so long, it is assumed that she has substantial financial backing for her re-election campaign. So, anyone opposing her needs to be able to muster sufficient resources to make a run meaningful. IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO FILE TO RUN.

Carson has been in the Senate for far too long, and as previously noted, she exemplifies the arrogance of power. She needs to be primaried and ultimately retired.

Full Disclosure: This writer is a Life Member of the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America, as well as a member of the NH Firearms Coalition.

The post Senator Sharon Carson: No Friend of Gun Owners appeared first on Granite Grok.

June 1st marked the beginning of hurricane season in the Atlantic basin. As we reported previously, everyone has been saying how warm the water is and appears desperate to see some storms. They were so desperate that on June 1st, the news was that they were tracking five tropical waves. FIVE!

Related: Atlantic Hurricane Season is Almost Here – Get Your Climate Hyperbole Ready!

They meant the weather. Five bits of weather.

Yesterday that number was down to three, same alarmism, but at no point—if you actually looked—did the National Hurricane Center ever report anything other than this.

Weather Underground – a great site with details, radar, and all that geeky business, has looked like this.

None. But there could be! And boy, oh, boy, we’re watching because we’re due, and everyone agrees it could be a hairy Atlantic Hurricane season. That is all true. We’ve done the research and looked to more reliable sources, and they all say the same thing. Lots of storms and lots of landfills. It has been a long time coming—just not this week.

This is the Atlantic Basin as of 9 AM ET Today (6-6-24).

There is weather with the potential. But week one is a nothing burger as the media plants its climate alarmism seeds. Again, I am not saying they are wrong about the potential. It looks like we could have a hell of a summer, but it has nothing to do with angry climate gods, and subjugating the West under a regime of taxation and declining lifestyles won’t make the weather better.

 

The post Media Jumps The Shark With Early Hurricane Hysteria appeared first on Granite Grok.

The Great Lawfare Backfire of 2024. The historic miscalculation will go down in the history books. This bright young woman knows the truth about Trump.pic.twitter.com/axUpYhZOja — Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) June 6, 2024 Tom Bowler

This question was posed to me the other day by a friend (I will paraphrase and omit the profanities): “How is it that New Hampshire, a state roughly the same geographic size of Vermont with about twice the population spends half the amount of taxpayer money that we do?”

Here are the actual numbers. New Hampshire’s population is about 1.4 million, and Vermont’s is about 640,000, so we’re slightly less than half. Vermont’s current budget is $8.5 billion while New Hampshire’s is $3.1 billion, so we spend well over two and a half times – nearly triple — more. Naturally, this means that, compared to Vermont, New Hampshire is in a state of total neglect. Children wandering the streets uneducated. The sick left to suffer and die. The poor abandoned hungry and unsheltered. Criminals terrorizing the citizenry…. Umm… no.

In fact, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, New Hampshire has 11.6 homeless people per 10,000 population, while Vermont has 43 — nearly four times as many! There are a few possible explanations for this. One is our economic and social welfare policymakers are such inept doofuses that they’re driving more citizens into systemic poverty. Another is our policies are so out of whack “generous” that homeless people are flocking to Vermont to free ride on the backs of Vermont taxpayers. But since homeless advocates are adamant that the latter is not happening (yeah, sure), we’ll have to go with the doofus hypothesis for now. (It actually applies to both scenarios).

When it comes to educating children, Vermont, according to US News & World Report, ranks 11th for student outcomes. Pretty good! But New Hampshire ranks 4th. Do they spend more to get better outcomes than we do. Nope. New Hampshire spends twenty percent LESS at $19,633 per pupil compared to Vermont’s $24,666 – and these numbers are before the coming 14% property tax increase, new internet service tax and short-term rental tax fueling a $200 million plus K-12 spending increase for next year.

Healthcare? According to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Vermont comes in 9th for overall quality. Still, New Hampshire comes in 6th. Is New Hampshire paying more for that higher quality. No. Oh, no… MoneyGeek reports a New Hampshirite’s annual health insurance bill comes in at $6072, or the tenth lowest nationally. A Vermonter’s? (Scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down…) There we are! Number 47 at $10,236.

What it comes down to is “Return on Investment” (ROI), or in layman’s terms, bang for the taxpayer’s buck. WalletHub does an annual analysis for ROI on state spending and, low and behold, New Hampshire is number one. Their legislators spend wisely and to good effect. Vermont is (scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down…) 43rd. Sandwiched between New Jersey and Arkansas of all the appalling places to find oneself. Our legislators, it seems, have a propensity to, rather than “invest’ our money as they would have us believe, something akin to piling it on the State House lawn and setting fire to it.

According to the WalleHub analysis of New Hampshire,

The Granite State’s tax resources have had a good impact on crime prevention and the environment, as the state has the second-lowest crime rate and the second-lowest air pollution in the country. It has one of the best public school systems as well…. New Hampshire residents are doing very well for themselves, considering they’re paying out less money in taxes, and the state has some of the lowest unemployment and poverty rates in the country.

And they do this with no income tax, no sales tax, and the sixteenth-lowest per capita state and local tax burden versus Vermont’s (scrolling down… scrolling down… scrolling down) forty-seventh. So, when you get your next property tax bill with its massive increase and try to cover it with a paycheck suddenly made smaller by a new payroll tax, etcetera, and so on, know that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Our politicians on the Left tell us Vermonters want more expensive government. No, we don’t. We want a cost-effective government. We might be willing to spend more if it meant getting better results, but that’s not happening. We’re paying a lot more for, quite frankly, really crappy service. The solution: stop electing doofuses who think your tax money is their ideological plaything, and start electing responsible adults who take seriously their responsibility according to the Vermont Constitution, Article 18, to apply a “firm adherence to… frugality.”

Rob Roper is a freelance writer with 20 years of experience in Vermont politics, including three years of service as chair of the Vermont Republican Party and nine years as President of the Ethan Allen Institute, Vermont’s free-market think tank. He is also a regular contributor to VermontGrok.

The post How Does New Hampshire Spend Half the Money for Better Results? appeared first on Granite Grok.

Teachers across America are speaking up about the lack of controlled behavior in public schools. What changed? Why are teachers frustrated because behavior problems have become unbearable?  Why are they leaving the profession in droves?

I believe there are many factors contributing to this problem. Parents who believe the school is a daycare center for their children are failing to do their job of raising respectful children. As a parental rights advocate in New Hampshire, I make no excuses for poor parenting. This is becoming a bigger problem that schools must deal with. But even if parents are failing to raise respectful children, that doesn’t mean that schools should be failing students, too.

The national fad is to provide students with Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), and more school counselors and social workers are being added to the payroll. You might be asking yourself, what does bad behavior have to do with any of this? Send these kids to the Principal’s office, where consequences will be administered. Sorry folks, a lot has changed since you were in school.

Classes have become chaotic with poor quality pedagogy practices. Instead of teachers teaching, teachers are told to have the kids work in groups. This will help them build collaboration skills for the workforce. Remember, public education is workforce training–it’s no longer about teaching them academics. The classroom can become chaotic, which then requires additional paraprofessionals in the room to help the teacher manage the class. This drives up the cost of education and requires a great deal of classroom management.

Schools use Project Based Learning or Inquiry Based Learning, which can add to problems in a classroom. Gone are the days of teacher-focused instruction which leads to higher levels of proficiency, kids are expected to teach each other in groups or go figure it out.

Social and emotional learning is supposed to help children self-manage their emotions and behaviors. But it can extend to group therapy and mental health assessments. This SEL data is collected, stored, and even shared without parents’ knowledge.

How does SEL replace consequences in the school for children who need that?

In this study, SEL Equity-based social-emotional learning (SEL): A critical lens for moving forward, they report: (emphasis added)

Authors King Lund, Hillis, Green, and Mofeld in their article, Mind-Sets Matter for Equitable Discipline: Aligning Beliefs to Practice Among Middle Grade Educators, also call attention to SEL. They write about how Restorative Justice Practices (RJP) offer a positive approach to disci-
pline while also providing middle school students opportunities to develop social-emotional skills (confict resolution and self-management). In contrast to other more traditional, punitive, and systemically inequitable models, RJP offers an approach where students of color are especially considered.

You can see the call to move away from the “punitive and systemically inequitable models” of consequences in schools. They then reference, “students of color are especially considered.”But does that work in the classroom? Many teachers across America are speaking up and talking about the behavior problems they are now expected to manage.

This article from Education Week attempts to explain Restorative Justice in the Classroom. But if you read the comments from educators, you will see that many of them don’t buy it.

 

 

It’s not that these teachers have “biases” or are racists, it’s that they know how kids work. They know that if you let kids off without any real consequences for their behavior, many will repeat bad behavior.  This isn’t rocket science, if you’ve raised children you know that boundaries must be set, and consequences administered, if the child defies those boundaries.

Can there be other factors to consider when a child breaks through those boundaries? Of course. Some kids learn the first time, some go on to repeat their actions to see how far they can go.

Teachers have become desperate for SEL or other fads because administrators are failing to bring order and discipline to the school. Some teachers are better at managing their classrooms but some of these faddish practices set teachers up to fail. They are there to teach, not become the enforcers.

When we were kids, we didn’t visit the school counselor for mental health if we were misbehaving. This isn’t a mental health issue, but that’s how some of them are treated. Or when you finally see the administrators punish the school bully, sometimes they go and reverse it. What kind of message is that sending the child?

Parents need to do their jobs, but it’s no excuse for the school system to fail these kids, too. This is one big set-up for failure when these kids get older.

MORE HERE:
Restorative circles are unethical and have no place in schools
Nine Criticisms of School Restorative Justice

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MUST WATCH: 20 minutes of The Experts calling Hunter Biden's laptop "Russian disinformation" Compilation by @KanekoaTheGreat pic.twitter.com/nRtu1gHnUW — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) June 5, 2024 Tom Bowler

I think we’ve been going about this all wrong. People “on our side” keep asking to fly flags in front of city hall and getting rejected, which hints at unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. The City just rejected a revolutionary-era flag.

And now it has rejected a trans-rights flag.

Nashua Mayor Jim Donchess rejected my appeal of the city’s decision to not allow me to fly a flag commemorating Detransition Awareness Day. I hope he has a change of heart as this medical scandal unravels.@NashuaOEM @JimDonchess #NHPolitics pic.twitter.com/lbsucXhHBa

— Sidewalk Steve (@Sidewalk_Steve) March 9, 2024

Trans rights. Yes. If you have a right to transition, you must also have a right to not transition (a choice) and the right to transition back. Otherwise, what you call trans rights is nothing of the sort, and by refusing to fly that flag, the City of Nashua and Mayor Donchess are anti-trans rights.

Prove me wrong.

We could say the same for a pro-life flag. Ask any pro-abortion supporter – even the intolerable harpies, and they will proudly announce that no one is making you get an abortion. It is a pro-choice argument, but I doubt Nashua would ever let anyone fly a pro-choice flag (where life is the choice) if such a thing even exists. Perhaps someone should try.

Going About It the Right Way

Some other pro-liberty person should request to fly a BLM flag or pride flag or some such thing. See if the City approves that. Or, if you can’t stomach the notion, take pictures of the flags they do fly, and we’ll probably have enough evidence for a case you can send to any number of pro-bono national liberty law firms who chase these sorts of things through the courts at their own expense.

In the name of rights and stuff and junk. Detransition rights, for example.

Just find a flag the City will fly that proves it is guilty of viewpoint discrimination unless you already have evidence, in which case it’s off to the races. Or just because it’s fun.

What’s the worst that could happen? The City has to stop pretending to be non-partisan and unbiased; no more citizen flags of any stripe. That’s what Boston did after wasting two million dollars defending its viewpoint discrimination and losing. Let them do that and then we get to ask them what else about their administration is just like the flag pole

The answer is probably everything.

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Rep she/her Selig wants you to know that she has a vagina and is heterosexual. This, apparently, is very important to her because in her tweet celebrating “Pride Month,” those are the first things she tells us … she has a vagina and is heterosexual. This is narcissism.

She/her Selig is actually celebrating her opinion of herself … I am different and better; yeah, I may have a vagina; yeah, I may like sex with men, but I am part of the elite, the enlightened, the chosen! 

She/her Selig and he fellow Woke-Communists are … I repeat … narcissists. They believe that their religion, Woke-Communism, makes them special, better, superior.

The post “Pride Month” Is Really About Woke-Communists Celebrating … Themselves appeared first on Granite Grok.

Most of you knwo about the years or fire predictions in the 1970s. Scientists believed we were at the beginning of another ice age. Experts, along with a compliant media, pimped story after story about the precipice of frozen doom and what we should do about it.

By 1978, everyone was well aware of the situation, but four years later, in 1982, the compliant media was singing a different song. The experts had been warning us about global warming “for years.”

Credibility, much?

Forty years into the latest thing and what experts believe has resulted in forty years of failed predictions, models that calculate the size of future grants but nothing about the earth’s climate or even the local weather.

Trillions have been wasted on non-productive purposes. A decades-long political movement whose only purpose is to realign the means of production.

Four years, and the narrative completely flips.

Tony Heller at RCSB shares a few of the receipts.
cc

The post Night Cap: The Rapid Change in “Climate Change” … Narrative appeared first on Granite Grok.

Incredible show of support for Donald Trump at last night’s (6/1) UFC 302. The pop he got when he walked in with Dana White gave you goosebumps. And it was not just the crowd … IN NEW JERSEY … showing Trump the love. The fighters did to … shaking his hand, taking selfies with him, giving him shout-outs in the post-fight interviews.

It’s very simple … real men support Trump, while the “men” who support BidenX are unhappy, low-t, no-t, pussy-boy, woke-commies. Don’t believe me … just look at the “men” with Ds after their names in the NH-House.

 

 

The post Real Men Support Trump … Low-T, No-T, Beta-Male Woke-Commies Support BidenX appeared first on Granite Grok.

A former Superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) is alleged to have used the power of her office to coerce financial institutions to refuse to do business with the National Rifle Association (NRA).

We see a good deal of this alleged misconduct as partisans engage with banks and insurance companies as a way to stifle an operation or impair its ability to operate, which includes the ability to freely associate, do business with, and engage in public expression.

Maria Vullo, while serving as DFS superintendent, appears to have made it her mission to ensure that those over whom her office had regulatory authority chose not to do business with the NRA. And while the action was based on a legitimate violation of state law.

[An] investigation revealed at least two kinds of violations of New York law: that Carry Guard insured intentional criminal acts, and the NRA promoted Carry Guard without an insurance producer license. By mid-November, upon finding out about the investigation following DFS information requests, Lockton and Chubb suspended Carry Guard.

Lockton and Chubb paid fines in the millions and made every effort to comply with New York State law, but Vullo used this single instance as an excuse to reach out to everyone and anyone associated with insurance lined to the NRA. Vullo used DFS letterhead. Vullo spoke as the Superintendent of the DFS. Vullo, upon finding minor violations, offered to dismiss or ignore them if the business promised to cease all relationships with the NRA (and any other gun groups). These companies complied, aiding Vullo’s viewpoint discrimination to make it difficult or impossible for the NRA to operate in the State.

The case made its way up the judicial food chain to the US Supreme Court which arrived at a 9-0 unanimous verdict. In the opinion written by Justice Sotomayor, Vullo is shown to have clearly violated the First Amendment rights of the NRA (citations removed).

Nothing in this case gives advocacy groups like the NRA a “right to absolute immunity from [government] investigation,” or a “right to disregard [state or federal] laws.”  Similarly, nothing here prevents government officials from forcefully condemning views with which they disagree. For those permissible actions, the Constitution “relies first and foremost on the ballot box, not on rules against viewpoint discrimination, to check the government when it speaks.”  Yet where, as here, a government official makes coercive threats in a private meeting behind closed doors, the “ballot box” is an especially poor check on that official’s authority. Ultimately, the critical takeaway is that the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech, directly or (as alleged here) through private intermediaries.

The Left hates the NRA, so they will hate this decision, but I have yet to see any email alerts from MoveOn listing Justice Sotomayor or Justice Jackson (for example) as “constitutional Threats” who must be impeached. I guess they can’t fundraise off of them, even when their BIPOC justices “vote” the wrong way.

 

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In 2016, New Hampshire Police and Fire rewarded Concord PD Julie Curtin for inter-Alia calling around the world to get internet posts taken down regarding Chessy Prout, the state witness in NH v Owen Labrie. She was rewarded for going above and beyond and getting “justice for the victim.”

Before all this happened, Laura L. Dunn (advisor to the White House “Not Alone” task force and co-founder of SurvJustice, a non-profit) had trained Concord PD and prosecutors in campus sexual assault investigations at UNH. The Executive Council approved a grant for the NHCADSV (a DOD contractor) for this purpose.

According to Laura Dunn’s resume, she handled the media during NH v Owen Labrie. According to the Concord Monitor from August 2015, Amanda Grady Sexton—of the NHCADSV, Sen Shaheen’s re-election campaign, and City of Concord Council—attended the Labrie trial to “keep tabs on the media,” seeing it as an “opportunity’ for the media to make important decisions about what is fair or not to report.

WMUR (Adam Sexton) had exclusive coverage on the trial, and influencer journalists hired specifically for the job from Vice Media, AP, Boston Globe, NYT, WaPo, and NBC were involved, along with political PR companies, including SKDK and HillImpact.com. NHPR’s Paige Sutherland had her tweets included in an exhibit to restrict media access, but she was never informed of this. I discovered this in court files.

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The trial was, I believe, the first trial in the U.S. to use and experiment with the Censorship Industrial Complex with full backing and communications with the White House during the trial from Laura L Dunn, who merely presented herself on TV as the “personal representative for the victim’s family.”

Everyone knew—Concord PD, Merrimack Prosecutors, Congresswoman Ann Kuster, City of Concord Council, Amanda Grady Sexton, Senator Jeanne Shaheen, UNH Law, UNH PIRC, DOE OCR, DOJ OVW, and the Prout family, who’d flown to DC to sort out the details with Laura L Dunn—except St Paul’s School, its community, and the defendant, Owen Labrie.

A book was already preplanned, media engagements were preplanned, work for the Democratic Party was preplanned, and the Prout family would earn an estimated $2 million between 2104 and 17 if they agreed to the plan set out and introduced by Concord PD and Laura L Dunn.

It is my belief that while Concord PD Julie Curtin was rewarded for censorship of Facebook and other social media posts regarding Chessy Prout, the negative posts may very well have been hoax posts created by and with the help of Concord PD Amanda Grady Sexton and Laura L Dunn in order to leverage public hatred against Owen Labrie and sympathy for Chessy Prout as the “survivor” that Congresswoman Ann Kuster needed in order to influence “the Harry Potter generation” (there was also the Harry Potter Alliance political organization as well).

New Hampshire’s AG has never investigated this but I believe there should be an investigation into the media, censorship and social media and censorship in the Labrie and St Paul’s cases. I believe that UNH PIRC (paid to create propaganda for the DOJ OVW and WH “Not Alone” task force) knows all about this.

Laura L Dunn instructed Concord PD Julie Curtin in 2014, according to an account by Chessy Prout. Laura L Dunn helped with the fake Rolling Stone UVA “A Rape on Campus” story, which led to the Eramo v Rolling Stone lawsuit. Dunn is featured in Exhibit 15B. Her resume states she was an expert witness in the case. Actually, she was instrumental in helping to place the story and instruct the journalist. Dunn lied about her own alleged sexual assault on a Center for Public Integrity program on NPR in 2010, which paved the way for her involvement in the unregulated “Dear Colleague “ Title IX directive introduced at UNH on April 4, 2011. She had on the board of SurvJustice, a social media influencer-Wagatwe Wanjuki.

Mimicking social media handles appears to be a specialty of Amanda Grady Sexton, NHCADSV, and Concord PD. It was after I wrote to the LEACT commission that my Twitter handle was followed by Amanda Grady Sexton and the NHCADSV. Then it was followed by a since removed handle called @letsheartherea1, which copied the anonymous @letshearthetru handle I started in July 2019 when Amanda Grady Sexton, NHCADSV, Congresswoman Kuster, Laura L Dunn, SurvJustice, et al. launched their successful social media and phone campaign to block Owen Labrie’s interview with Amy Robach on ABC from airing. Dan Hill of hillimpact.com (working with NHCADSV, Prouts and Laura L Dunn, and Kuster) was sent in to try to phish and find out my identity on Twitter, to mock me, smear me, accuse me of being a rape apologist, etc.

I am none of these. I read actual records. I read actual depositions and discovery.

New Hampshire has allowed its justice system and its educational institutions to be tainted by the censorship of the military-industrial complex. The result: a rapidly failing democracy because democracy cannot thrive without divisions between branches of government and the media.

The book, with introduction by Congresswoman Ann Kuster and heavily promoted by the NHCADSV, SurvJustice and Laura L Dunn: ihavetherighttobook.com equates Owen Labrie to an “Al Qaeda terrorist” and “Donald Trump”. Simultaneously, Chessy Prout expresses awe at meeting Bill Clinton- who lied to the public about his torrid abuse of power to sexually abuse and then have his wife smear Monica Lewinsky. The Prout family was effectively recruited before the trial of Owen Labrie to work for the 2016 Clinton campaign via Shaheen’s campaign director Amanda Grady Sexton, Concord PD Julie Curtin, and It’s On Us.

Dan Hill got pretty angry with me for figuring this out. He doesn’t have such a stellar reputation when you start digging. It’s amazing what you can get away with in NH courts once you use media to create, manipulate, and control the narrative in order to get government contracts as NHCADSV, SurvJustice, and the Concord PD did.

They are happy to remove social media and articles that are negative to Chessy Prout or NHCADSV, but ask NH AP to correct the actual facts about Owen Labrie, and you will get nowhere.

Do you want your children to be incited to commit hate violence against someone because of what they read about someone in the news from articles generated and controlled by the NHCADSV, or do you want them to become critical thinkers?

I have worked in media for over 30 years in the UK, the US, and around the world. I understand how censorship works because I have had to deal with it in the course of my career in studios and agencies and as a freelancer filming in Mexico, Japan, South America, and Germany before the wall came down, as well as China and Japan. I knew something was wrong in the Labrie trial regarding the sensationalized coverage. I was horrified by what I uncovered.

Liars beget liars to cover lies.

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An article on Nashua Inklink stated that the school district budget was going up 4.49%. However, the City’s 2025 Budget book states that the School District is going up 4.94%. One would think that someone made a typo, but no, it gets better.

In going back to Superintendent Mario Andrade, he stated that the school district does not pick up benefits, and no, he is not kidding.

The Nashua residents should take note that the benefits amount to $51 million dollars, and believe me when I say that the Nashua taxpayers do pay for them. Of course, the benefits to employees need to be put in because all employees, including teachers, are getting these “benefits.” This additional $51 million dollars will also change the cost per student from $17,775 to $18,380. A resident should forget that my figures do not include the School Special Revenues and School Grants, which are included in the City’s budget but NOT in the school budget.

Residents pay all this for a below-par education in our public schools for our children. Per the Student Proficiency Assessment of 2023, Nashua scores were:

North HS   South HS  Academy of Arts
Math Proficiency  34%  48%  86%
Reading Proficiency 58%  65%  90%
Science Proficiency 41%  53%  84%

Also reported in this assessment was the fact that the average salary for North and South teachers was $65,319 and the cost per pupil was $19,498 compared to the Academy of Arts & Science, where the average salary was $43,566 and cost per pupil was $9,985. And residents wonder why there has been an increase in Charter School enrollment, up by 35% since 2019 (per Union Leader 1/11/2024 report).

If a resident goes to page 25 of the school budget presentation, they will note that the average teacher has 18.4 students, down from 18.9 students last year.

If a resident goes to the school district budget, they will see on page 11 that the school district shows the 24 Adopted Budget vs the Proposed 2025 Budget.

Adopted Budget for 2024:

Labor $98.1 million 56%
Benefits $48.2 million 28%
Proposed Budget for 2025:
Labor $100.0 million 55%
Benefits $50.9 million 28%

This shows that 83% of the school budget is going to employees for salaries and benefits. All teachers have city and state-funded pensions whereas most people do not get this luxury.

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